Post-Darwinist

This blog provides stories that Denyse O'Leary, a Toronto-based journalist, has found to be of interest, as she covers the growing intelligent design controversy. It supports her book By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004). Does the universe - and do life forms - show evidence of intelligent design? If so, Carl Sagan was wrong and so is Richard Dawkins. Now what?

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

A key Vatican news service offers more on what the Pope really said when he used the term “intelligent plan” (which is, apparently, the Italian usage for “intelligent design”).

"Deceived by atheism, they believe and try to demonstrate that it is scientific to think that everything lacks a guide and order," he continued. "The Lord, with sacred Scripture, awakens the drowsy reason and says to us: In the beginning is the creative Word. In the beginning the creative Word -- this Word that has created everything, which has created this intelligent plan, the cosmos -- is also Love."

The Pontiff concluded, exhorting his listeners to allow themselves "to be awakened by this Word of God" and invited them to pray that "he clear our minds so that we will be able to perceive the message of creation, inscribed also in our hearts: The beginning of everything is creative Wisdom and this Wisdom is love and goodness."

(Note: If you came here looking for the story about the Pope using the term "intelligent design" to describe the Catholic view of origins, go here. Other frequently sought stories (academic freedom, museums fanatically promoting Darwinism, lawsuit over use of public funds to promote liberal religious views on evolution) appear at the bottom of today's posts. )

Scrappleface bemoans loss of jobs in Kansas, due to recent decision to teach weaknesses as well as strengths of Darwin’s theory:

(2005-11-09) - A coalition of major corporations based in Kansas today announced they would close their operations in the state and move to places where high schools can still teach "that old time evolution" without challenge from alternative theories like intelligent design.

[ ... ]

According to an unnamed spokesman for the corporate coalition, the businesses plan to relocate to communities in states "where faith in evolution helps to build strong families and produces workers who know the value of slow, undirected change over vast spans of time."

Slow, undirected change over vast spans of time? Dead ringer for some local government employees who shall otherwise remain nameless. The good news is, such people would rarely do much harm unless they work for 9-11.

In an interesting contrarian essay on the intelligent design controversy, James Bownman notes in the New Criterion,

... contrarian that I am, I don’t seem to be able to keep myself from sympathy for those who find themselves in the bull’s eye of the media culture, no matter how unsympathetic I might otherwise find them—and from growing more and more sympathetic to them the more they are hated and reviled. The Intelligent Design people are thus beginning to look to me a bit like President George W. Bush, who has been so viciously and so unfairly execrated for so long by the sort of right-thinking media-and-entertainment types who consider Maureen Dowd a wit that I now regularly have to stifle the urge to cry him up as the greatest president since Lincoln. And he, I started out thinking, was at least a decent sort of guy. Lately I have had to clasp to my bosom such relatively unlovely media-butts as Karl Rove and Tom DeLay, men of whom I might in other circumstances be inclined to be rather critical. But I tell myself that I can’t go so very wrong by continuing to love those whom the media hate and hate those whom the media love.

He makes a number of interesting points, and he thinks John Lennon is as silly as I do. (Well-meaning, sure, but silly.)

(Note: If you came here looking for the story about the Pope using the term "intelligent design" to describe the Catholic view of origins, go here. Other frequently sought stories (academic freedom, museums fanatically promoting Darwinism, lawsuit over use of public funds to promote liberal religious views on evolution) appear at the bottom of today's posts. )

Roseville, California, lawyer Larry Caldwell is suing over the use of tax money by Darwin lobby groups to promote religious views that accept Darwinian evolution (as opposed to ones that don’t). I’m pegging this one as the next big story. See also the ruling on tax funds. Note the line that the “free speech” people take. How to freak out your bio prof? What happened when a student bypassed the usual route of getting frogs drunk and dropping them down the chancellor’s robes, and tried questioning Darwinism instead.

Christoph, Cardinal Schonbon is not backing down from his contention that Darwinism is incompatible with Catholic faith, and Pope Benedict XVI probably thinks that’s just fine. Major US media have been trying to reach rewrite for months, with no success.

Museum tour guides to be trained to "respond" to those who question Darwinism. Read this item for an example of what at least one museum hopes to have them say.

Blog policy note: Blogger software now permits me to moderate comments before they appear, so I am re-enabling comments on a trial basis. Regular readers may recall that for a while I disabled comments due to persistent problems with defamation and obscenity. One person, who is probably not in the running for Brilliant Rocket Scientist of the Year, made a defamatory remark about an American attorney who has demonstrated his willingness to sue in cases of defamation! After that scary episode, a legal advisor strictly warned me to either permit no comments or else make no effort to moderate them - and advertise the fact that I don't. For a while, I simply chose the first way because the second sounds completely unacceptable. Now that Blogger software has very recently enabled me to screen Comments prior to publication, let's hope we can have a lively Letters to the Editor column. As usual, no one need go to the trouble of bothering me with profanity, blasphemy, defamation, naked URLs, solicitations or appeals, threats, insults, or any material that a Canadian grandmother who has been in the news business for thirty-five years would be unlikely to publish. The Internet is the last free country in the world, and someone, somewhere, will surely publish such rubbish, so even if you think I am a prude, your rights are not violated thereby.